So Supernatural - MYSTICAL: The Fox Sisters

Episode Date: July 7, 2021

In the spring of 1848, the Fox sisters heard the chilling sounds of rapping and thumping on their walls. When the noise wouldn't stop, the girls started rapping back. Soon after that, they started speaking to the dead. 

It's an age-old question. What happens when we die? Every religion has its own version of the afterlife. Some people are sure that nothing comes after death. We just stop existing. But the truth is, no one really knows, and that uncertainty nags at us. What would you do if someone offered you an answer? Proof that our spirits live on after death and that we can still communicate with the people who have passed? What would it take for you to believe it? This is the story, and I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

This week, we're talking about the Fox sisters. In the mid-19th century, these three sisters became a national phenomenon because of their alleged mystical powers. They claimed they could summon and communicate with the dead. We'll have all that and more coming up. Stay with us. Today's story begins in December of 1847 when the Fox family moves to the rural community of Hydesville, New York. They plan to build their own home in the new town,

but the winter is pretty brutal, so the construction comes to a stop. In the meantime, John and Margaret Fox rent a modest house near the town center and move in with their two young daughters, 14-year-old Maggie and 11-year-old Kate. This rental house is small. Like, the four of them have to share a single bedroom. The

parents sleep in one bed and Maggie and Kate in another. And while it's kind of tight, the Foxes are relatively happy. John is a reformed alcoholic with a new outlook on life. Margaret is a super sweet mother who lives for her children. As for Maggie and Kate, they're pretty much glued at the hip, so they're never bored. Most nights in the new house are pretty unremarkable. After doing some chores and blowing out the candle, they slip into their beds and fall asleep to the peaceful sounds of the river nearby. Of course, there are other sounds too, you know, the standard, creepy sounds that come with living in a tiny shack in the middle of the woods. The wind howling, the creaking of old trees, the pitter-patter of creatures scuttering through the night. But on a cold March night, the foxes wake up to hear something different, something otherworldly.

There's a sudden rapping on the walls, thumping on the ceilings, and vibrations all around them. Naturally, everyone's a little alarmed, so they relight the candle and investigate. The sound has to have a source, an open window rattling, an animal trapped inside, a woodpecker on the roof. It could be any number of things. But after checking every corner of the room and popping their heads outside, they don't find anything out of the ordinary. Which is a little weird, sure, but it's the middle of the night and everyone's tired. So John, Margaret, Maggie, and Kate all go back to bed, hoping that the sounds will just go away on their own. But that's wishful thinking. The Raps and Knocks return for several more nights. The Foxes still

can't figure out where it's coming from, and they're starting to get delirious from the lack of sleep. Finally, on March 31st, 11-year-old Kate decides to respond. I have no idea why. She just starts snapping her fingers. And when she does, whatever's in the room raps back at her. Soon, Maggie joins in, and the same thing happens again. Whenever she makes a sound, something responds. It's like they're conversing in Morse code or something. Their mother, Margaret, immediately senses they're in the presence of something supernatural.

She starts asking questions like, if you're an injured spirit, respond with three raps. And then they hear three knocks. Then she asks, do it again if you were injured in this house. Another three knocks. Obviously, this is a lot for the family to process. Not only are they all running on basically no sleep, but they've just been told that they're living with the spirit of someone who was injured, maybe even killed, exactly where they're standing. But before they pack their bags and start running, the Foxes take a step back and decide to get some input from a third party to

confirm that all this is actually happening. So they ask their neighbor, Mary Redfield, to come over. When Mary arrives, the spirit doesn't shy away at all. Margaret asks some more questions, and the spirit continues rapping and knocking at all. Margaret asks some more questions and the spirit continues rapping and knocking all around the house, answering question after question. But what really shocks everyone is that the spirit doesn't just talk about itself. It knows things about everyone, like things it shouldn't know. For example, Margaret asks the spirit to reveal Mary's age just to see what happens. And to everyone's surprise, it wraps a total of 33 times. That's exactly how old Mary is. And Mary is speechless. When she gets home, she tells her husband what happened. And within hours,

word spreads around the little town like wildfire. That very same night, over a dozen neighbors visit the Fox house. One of the visitors, this guy named William Dusler, actually used to live in that house about seven years earlier. And he's not buying the ghost story for a second. In the brief time he lived there, he never once experienced a haunting. So being a skeptic, he takes over asking the questions. Now, before this, the foxes were mostly asking simple yes or no questions, like knock once for yes and remain silent for no. But William wants specific answers, so he tells the spirit to actually spell out words. How it works is,

William calls out the letters of the alphabet, and when he says the right letter, the spirit knocks. It takes a while, but the spirit is able to spell out words and even form sentences. Through this process, the spirit reveals that he used to be a peddler named Charles.

About five years earlier, that had been a couple years after William moved out, Charles came knocking on the house's door. The man who lived there invited Charles in, but once he stepped inside, he cut Charles's throat with a butcher knife and buried him down in the cellar. That's pretty wild, right? What makes this story believable, though, is that Charles spells out the name of his killer, John Bell. There actually was a man named John Bell who used to live in that house. Everyone in town remembers him. But there's only one way to prove this story is true.

One of the townsmen grabs a candle and goes down into the cellar. It has a dirt floor, so Charles could easily be buried anywhere. The man does a quick search, but he doesn't find anything suspicious. By now, it's really late, so they all decide to call it a night and come back tomorrow. Now remember, this is all happening in the 1840s in a rural community. This is like the most exciting thing that's ever happened. The gossip spreads so far and so fast, by the following day, hundreds of people are outside the Fox house hoping to meet the spirit for themselves. And they do. Naturally, people have a lot of questions for Charles, but they're no longer that interested

in solving his murder. They have more important questions like, what happens after we die? Are my dead loved ones still around? Do my religious beliefs still hold true? Some of his responses are still hard to accept. I mean, this community is pretty Christian, and the very existence of ghosts is against their beliefs. But Charles tries his best to give the townspeople some peace of mind. He acknowledges that there's a heaven and that God is all-powerful. He tells a pair of grieving parents that their recently departed child is doing okay. In a weird way, it's sort of comforting. But of course, some people are still skeptical. And the only way to prove that Charles is legit is to find his remains. So later that day, a group of men go down to the cellar with some shovels and they start digging. But the

thing is, this house is right next to a river, like right next to it. And once they dig about three feet deep, water starts to rise. The men have to stop or the whole cellar will flood. But no one can stop thinking about Charles. So three months later, another group of townsmen arrive and try again. They dig deeper and deeper into the dirt, even as the water slowly rises around them. And finally, they find something. It appears to be strands of human hair and fragments of bone. They found Charles. Coming up, the Fox sisters inspire a spiritual awakening.

Now back to the story. In the summer of 1848, a group of townsmen discover what appears to be human remains in the Fox family's cellar. It looks like the story of Charles the Peddler is actually true. By now, a bunch of previous tenants have come out of the woodwork and say when they lived in this house, they also heard rapping and knocking. One servant also reveals that she'd seen a male spirit roaming about. At this point, the Fox family is fully freaked out. They're not staying in a haunted house any longer. So within days, they pack their bags and move in with a relative in the nearby town of Arcadia. But to everyone's horror, the spirit follows them. Wherever they go, Maggie and Kate can still hear the rapping sounds. Strangely, nobody else can hear it anymore, just Maggie and Kate. And Charles

isn't the only spirit eager to talk. Countless different spirits find their way to the girls, each with their own story to tell. So now the foxes are thinking maybe it's not the house that's haunted. Maybe it's their daughters. Maybe Maggie and Kate have some kind of supernatural touch and they're able to help the dead break through to the world of the living. Which sounds kind of cool and all, but you've got to remember how young these girls are. Maggie's 14 and Kate's only 11. Their parents understandably just want the spirits to leave them alone.

Now, I don't completely understand the logic here, but they came to the conclusion that the best way to stop it was to split the girls up. They might have thought that putting some distance between them would weaken their powers and make it harder for spirits to communicate with them. Or maybe they were trying to figure out if only one of the girls was the supernatural magnet or if it was both. Whatever the reason, Maggie stays with her parents and relatives in Arcadia. Meanwhile, Kate travels about 30 miles west to stay with her much older sister, Leah, who lives in Rochester. But the split doesn't help. The rapping, knocking, and thumping continues to follow Maggie all around Arcadia,

and over in Rochester, things are only getting worse for Kate. According to Leah, quote, Tables and everything in the room below us were being moved about. Doors were being opened and shut, making the greatest possible noises. Then they walked upstairs and into the room next to us, end quote. You'd think Leah would have sent her sister packing right then and there, but she doesn't. In fact, Leah seems completely unfazed by the hauntings. It actually reminds her of a little family secret. Their great-grandmother was rumored to be a clairvoyant.

According to family lore, she could predict a person's death weeks before it happened. So Leah assumes that their great-grandmother's powers have been passed down to Maggie and Kate. See, Leah is a single mom who has to hustle to put food on the table. And she realizes that if her sisters can really speak to the dead, lots of people would pay to meet them. So not too long after Kate arrives, Leah invites Maggie to live with her in Rochester too. She spends the rest of the summer helping the girls hone their abilities. Over time, they develop a more complex system of communication. Three raps means yes, a single knock means no, and five raps means that the spirit wants to use the alphabet to spell something out.

After a few months, the sisters feel confident enough to start holding private seances. A lot of their visitors are genuine believers, hoping to make some connection to a deceased relative or friend. And Maggie and Kate do just that. After the session, the guests leave feeling a sense of peace and closure. But some visitors are pure skeptics. They sit in the sisters' parlor room looking for anything that might suggest fraud. But usually, these skeptics leave very disappointed. Sometimes, they even become the sisters' most passionate supporters. For example, in November of 1848, a journalist named Eliab Capron comes to Rochester and attends one of

these seances. As always, the spirit seems to know all things they shouldn't know. According to Eliab, they're even able to read his mind. Still, it's hard for him to accept what he's seeing and hearing is real. So he conducts this little test of his own. There's a bowl of shells on the table and he grabs a handful of them and closes his hand. Then he asks the spirit to tell him how many are in his hand. The spirit answers correctly. Then he asks the spirit to tell him how many are in his hand. The spirit answers correctly, and Eliab is completely blown away. So much so that the next fall, Eliab invites 12-year-old Kate to stay with him and his wife in Auburn, New York.

But it's not like she's on vacation. Eliab puts her to work. He thinks Kate is the most gifted of the two sisters, so he puts her through an intense series of tests. I'm not exactly sure what these tests consisted of, but apparently she passes with flying colors. But just as her abilities seem to be developing, so do the spirits. During one of Kate's seances, the chairs suddenly become stuck to the floor

and a table flips over. Another time, a comb flies out of a woman's hair, and another time, someone actually feels a spirit's hand touching their arm. After witnessing so many of these occurrences in person, Eliab is now fully confident that the spirits are real and Kate is some kind of spiritual magnet. He publishes an account of her abilities and the word gets around. Back at home, Maggie is gaining a similar reputation and so is Leah. Leah starts having these vivid dreams where she seems to get messages straight from the spirit world. Before the year is up, all three Fox sisters are celebrated for their supernatural gifts, and their biggest fans are the spirits. Allegedly, by the fall of 1849, a bunch of spirits are

telling the sisters to spread a message to the masses. They want the whole world to know that the afterlife is real and spirits can interact with the living long after they die. This idea is the basis for a new belief system, which becomes known as modern spiritualism, and the Fox sisters are ready to spread the truth to the world. The spirits instruct Leah and Maggie to host a show at the largest theater in Rochester, the Grand Corinthian Hall. On November 14, 1849, about 400 people pack inside to see what the sisters have to say. Some of them are spiritualists who are eager for the world to get on board with their movement. On the other hand, there are also skeptics who can't wait to tear the Fox sisters apart and expose them as frauds. When 16-year-old Maggie takes the stage, the audience goes silent.

She doesn't look like what most people are expecting. She's young, she's pretty, and she's wearing this adorable dress. She's just an innocent girl, someone you're inclined to trust. Everyone watches quietly as Maggie starts communicating with the spirits through a series of raps. But while it seems convincing enough, much of the audience still isn't sold. The next morning, this committee of skeptics meets with Maggie and Leah at a smaller venue to do some tests of their own. They're basically trying to prove that the sisters are frauds. At one point, they realize that a lot of the rapping sounds seem to be coming from the floor and they begin to suspect that the girls are doing something with their feet. So they take them into

a private room and place their hands all over their feet and ankles to make sure they're not moving. But despite this kind of invasive search, they can't actually say for certain whether the girls are making the sounds with their feet. Now, that doesn't really settle anything for the skeptics, so another committee is formed to investigate. The next day, they order Maggie and Leah to lie down on a table while the committee members closely examine them to see if any of their body parts are making the sound. Once again, the committee comes up with nothing. By now, you'd think they'd get the picture and just let the girls be, but the skeptics are still not letting it go. The day after that, there is a third investigation.

This time, there are women on the committee who take Maggie and Leah into a private room and strip search them. This is obviously extremely traumatic, especially for Maggie, who's only 16. Both sisters are embarrassed and crying, and eventually someone intervenes and stops the investigation. Once again, the committee can't definitively say where the raps are coming from, but the three-day investigation makes one thing clear. As far as anyone can tell, the Fox sisters are the real deal. After that, Maggie, Kate, and Leah become seriously famous. Everyone from Frederick Douglass to the editor of the New York Tribune suddenly wants to meet them. The editor even writes a piece on them that says, quote, whatever may be the origin or

cause of the wrappings, the ladies in whose presence they occur do not make them. We tested this thoroughly and to our entire satisfaction. With so many powerful people in their court, Maggie, Kate, and Leah live exciting lives for the next few years. They travel throughout the country and sometimes the world, helping people communicate with the dead. By this point, Maggie and Kate are growing up before everyone's eyes, and they're becoming very beautiful women. And naturally, this attracts a string of male clients. And in the fall of 1852, a man named Elisha Kane goes to one of their seances and falls head over heels for Maggie. Elisha isn't exactly your average guy either. He's a famous

explorer who comes from a very prominent family. And even though he agrees to attend one of these seances, he finds the whole movement ridiculous. He starts dating Maggie, but after a while, he pressures her to renounce spiritualism and convert to Catholicism. And she actually does. Of course, Lee is not too happy about all this. For years, she'd been making a good living off her sister's seances. With Maggie gone, it not only drives down their profits, it makes Kate and Leah seem way less credible. This creates a big rift between the sisters. From that point on, they'll all go on to live very separate lives.

While Maggie and Kate eventually get married, both of their husbands die young, and over the next few decades, they each struggle to provide for themselves and their families. Meanwhile, Leah keeps finding new ways to make money off her supposed abilities. In addition to holding private seances, she pens a book about herself and her sisters, but she mainly focuses on herself leaving Maggie and Kate in the dust. And this really makes Maggie and Kate's blood boil. After all, Leah is the one who led them down this path in the first place, and now she's abandoning them. They start to think if she hadn't pushed them into spiritualism in the first place, they might all be better off. The tension finally breaks in 1888 when 54-year-old Maggie gives an interview telling her side of the story.

She says, quote, Kate and I were little children and this old woman, my older sister Leah, made us her tools. Our sister used us in her exhibitions and we made money for her. Now she turns upon us because she's the wife of a rich man and she opposes us both wherever she can. In that same interview, Maggie makes a startling declaration. She reveals that all the sounds, the rapping, the knocking, the thumping, were all parlor tricks. She and her sisters are frauds. Coming up, the Fox sisters fall from grace. Now back to the story. In the fall of 1888, Maggie Fox denounces spiritualism and claims she and her

sisters are all frauds. She explains they learned how to make the famous rapping sounds as young girls when they lived in the rented house in Hydesville. To prove she's telling the truth, Maggie's willing to show the world how it's done. She stands before a crowd at the New York Academy of Music and reads the following statement. The wrappings are simply the result of a perfect control of the muscles of the leg below the knee, which govern the tendons of the foot and allow action of the toe and ankle bones that are not commonly known. Basically, they're just cracking their joints. She even demonstrates to show everyone what it sounds like. To explain why the girls lied for so long, Maggie points the finger at Leah. According to Maggie, Leah wanted to start

a new religion for profit. And while Maggie and Kate knew that the sounds were just tricks, Leah insisted that she really had spiritual powers and that they all needed to work together to help souls move on. So Maggie and Kate kept up the ruse, hoping to also reach the same level of spiritual power that Leah claimed to have. But after 40 years of pushing spiritualism to the masses, that power never came. So in the end, it all seems like a hoax. A really good one, sure, but now that Maggie confessed, it seems to be obvious, right? But there are still a few sticking points. If they were really just con artists, how did the sisters know so much about all the people that they met? How were they able to answer so many questions correctly? And how were they able to make objects suddenly move on their own? To countless believers,

it doesn't seem like the story could just end here. And in fact, it doesn't. About a year later in the fall of 1889, Maggie rescinds her confession. According to Maggie, she was under a lot of pressure by Catholics to renounce spiritualism. She was also hard up for cash, so some people believe that rich skeptics actually paid her off to do it. Either way, Maggie apologizes for the damage she's done to the movement and eventually returns to performing seances. From then on, all three Fox sisters continue to insist that they can speak to the dead until their own deaths in the early 1890s. It's kind of hard to make sense of the sudden confession and reversal, but we have to look at the motivation. If Maggie renounced spiritualism just because she was under pressure and needed cash, who's to say she

wouldn't return to spiritualism for the same reasons? The fact that Maggie was able to demonstrate how the rapping sounds were made seems like solid proof that it was a hoax. As for how the sisters were able to answer so many questions, I mean, it could have been lucky guesses or confirmation bias. People remembered the correct answers and forgot about the ones that were off the mark? Interestingly, even though the Fox sisters were pretty much debunked, spiritualism still remains alive and well today. Believers tend to assume that Maggie's confession was a lie and her recantation was the truth. Skeptics, of course, on the other hand, take Maggie's initial confession as truth and see the Fox sisters as con artists.

Whatever you believe, Maggie, Kate, and Leah definitely achieved their goal of spreading spiritualism around the world. If they were right, their spirits might still be among us. And if you listen closely at night, who knows? They might reveal the truth. Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all AudioChuck originals.